“Silent friend[s] of many distances,” I write to you from the mountains where Rilke wrote his final elegies and the whole of the Sonnets to Orpheus. I am thankful to the Dartmouth Leslie Center Faculty Research Fellowship funds for their support. Someone in Berlin said to me, You’re going to where there are cow bells. Indeed, it is so. I loved Berlin, and I felt I belonged there easily. But I am equally a woman of mountains and forests. For so long, I wanted to walk in Germany and Switzerland in honor of my favorite poet, Rilke. And I loved the green. And I did not know fully why I came. Was it to be near to what is nowhere? Was it to think I could have the same achievements descend upon me with such force as to leave one trembling, and with such a sheaf of poems? Was it to be closer to the beloved’s words? I do not know. All I know is that, witnessing these mountains, sitting here looking at them, I will never read “Ausgesetzt auf den Bergen des Herzen” [Exposed on the mountains of the heart] the same again. I have lived my whole life in the Green Mountains of Vermont. But my mountains are the soft roundness of reclined body’s breasts; they are closed eyes, tree-covered deep sleep. These are air and power; and the whole of the bared giantess. They leave nothing hidden. Their slopes are vertical, and they are sometimes treed, other times snowy, and other times slippery rocks and sand. You are confronted by the sad hubris of Babble and the awesomeness of earth itself. The people here are settled on the slopes. The water is delicious. I have eaten chocolate and far too much espresso. I’ve been reading letters and poems. I’ve written only prose. Here is a small recording I made today.
What landscapes changed your poems? Do you inhabit deserts, cities, woods, mountains in your poems?